In creating Schwarz Alternative School, the Recovery School District faced one of the toughest jobs in American schooling: to teach and minister to the neediest students in one of the nation's poorest and most violent cities. Many arrived with criminal histories. Nearly all had been expelled from other schools.

To this task, district leaders assigned a cast of rookie teachers and a company with revolving local leadership. The system housed the faculty and students in a crumbling, termite-infested building with spotty air conditioning, few supplies and a single full-time social worker for at times more than 300 students, four Schwarz teachers said.

To maintain control, the private management company, Camelot Schools, fielded its own security force. They were typically large men -- some of whom regularly slammed students into floors and walls for defiant behavior, according to accounts from six students, a youth advocate who regularly visited the school, a former Camelot staffer and two Orleans Parish Juvenile Court judges.

One juvenile court judge asked the district attorney to investigate. A photo, taken by a staff member, shows a gaping hole in a classroom wall, made after a Camelot staff member slammed a girl -- as she flailed -- into the decaying facade for disobeying an order, the student said in an interview.

SUSAN POAG/THE TIMES-PICAYUNEPedro Segarra, executive director of the New Orleans area region for Camelot Schools, spends a majority of his days at Schwarz, where he is involved in the day-to-day running of the school.

Camelot encouraged its staff to be aggressive, said Donald Lindsey, a "behavior interventionist" hired -- and, ultimately, released -- by Camelot.

In the process, students got hurt, both by one another and by the staff assigned to protect them. Meanwhile, an overwhelmed faculty struggled to educate kids amid frequent chaos.

"In neglecting Schwarz, I feel that the powers-that-be were essentially saying to the kids: 'You had your chance and you blew it,'" said Mitra Jalali, a Teach For America instructor who taught at Schwarz last year. "In a merit-based system, maybe our kids aren't the most deserving. But in a needs-based system, they deserve the most."

School and district documents and interviews with more than two dozen students, parents, teachers, officials and experts -- as well as two visits to Schwarz -- revealed a dismal portrait of a beleaguered staff struggling daily to meet students' severe needs. Among the issues at the school:

--More than three-quarters of Schwarz's teachers started the school year with less than two years of teaching experience, state records show. Further, the school's instructional leader, Nia Porter, had never been a principal.

--Security staff regularly used a practice students called "slamming" even when students posed no immediate threat, said school staff members and a visitor to the school.

--New Orleans police responded to 53 calls at Schwarz since Jan. 1 for a variety of disturbances, including fights and assaults, said NOPD spokesman Bob Young. Last month, police arrested a school staffer for "slapping" a student, police said. The RSD said the arrested party was a substitute teacher.

--On the rundown former elementary school campus, several rooms lacked air conditioning and had cracked walls with peeling paint. For the first months of the school year, the library had no books. Part of a termite-damaged wall once collapsed as a student was restrained, teachers reported.

--New students often arrived with little or no documentation about their learning disabilities, past experiences -- even grade levels -- making it difficult to address their needs.

--Students who had clashed previously were sent to Schwarz together. This was done for lack of other viable settings, particularly until a second alternative school opened midyear. One girl ran away on her first day after seeing a boy who had shot her six months earlier, according to her mother.

In interviews and written statements, Recovery School District officials argued the school did well by students in light of tremendous challenges. Further, Camelot leaders denied the use of inappropriate physical force.

"They've done a pretty good job, all things considered," Recovery District Superintendent Paul Vallas said of Camelot's leadership.

Vallas stressed that the district had to rebuild an alternative program from scratch. New students arrived daily, and the school population swelled from 50 to well over 300. Nearly all students were years behind in school. Many 17-year-olds had not yet finished the eighth grade.

Vallas said the district regularly found children slots in nonprofit programs if Schwarz did not seem suitable. A network of Recovery District counselors visited regularly to provide support to the school, he added. Porter, the school's director of education, the district noted in a statement, "has experience in urban school settings" and is fully certified as a principal.

Vallas added that many school buildings have structural deficits such as outdated wiring: a challenge of working in flood-damaged buildings that had long been neglected before Katrina.

Further, the district's alternative schools network will expand to include new sites, including an elementary school, in the coming school year, which will ease the crunch at Schwarz, officials noted.

Dissenting view

Several Schwarz staff members offered a starkly different view. Officials within and without the system became aware of problems at Schwarz at various points through the year but took little action, said William Brown, who taught physical education. Michael Haggen, the deputy superintendent who oversaw alternative education at the Recovery District, did visit Schwarz several times, Brown said.

But "judges and politicians would always say, 'We are going to come visit and see what's going on,'" he said. "Most didn't come a single time."

Many cities and states have struggled to create viable programs for troubled youth. Kathleen Whalen, who worked as the liaison between the juvenile courts and school district before Katrina, noted that, with a couple of exceptions, alternative schools in New Orleans historically have served as little more than holding places.

"It's just: Hold them and send them back" to their home schools, she said.

But Mark Steward, who ran Missouri's nationally recognized Division of Youth Services for incarcerated children, said alternative school staffs, with proper training and support, can make great strides.

His programs also used physical restraints, but only as a last resort. "So many of these kids have come from a violent background, and the last thing they need to see is more of the same," he said.

Outsourcing the problem

The state-run Recovery School District outsourced the management of Schwarz last school year to Camelot, a for-profit company that runs alternative schools and youth treatment centers in several states. In the past year and a half, the state paid Camelot nearly $3 million to help run three New Orleans sites and owes the company another $1.2 million, according to the company.

The Camelot sites were Schwarz; Booker T. Washington, a school for overage students who continually failed the high-stakes LEAP test but did not necessarily have behavior problems; and Excel Academy, another school that served as an alternative site for part of the year.

Vallas courted Camelot, saying the company had proven successful in Philadelphia during his stint as superintendent there. Last week Philadelphia expanded its contract with Camelot, citing the company's favorable tenure there.

In 2006 the Recovery School District put out a request for proposals for alternative schools operators, but none responded. Under Vallas' tenure, which started in 2007, it recruited operators on its own.

In written responses to questions, Camelot officials said its staffers performed well given a challenging assignment. But they strongly denied that staff inappropriately "slammed" students.

"A few students realized that using this pejorative term diverted attention away from their behavior and placed it on staff members," they wrote.

They said New Orleans police and Family Court investigated some of the allegations and found no wrongdoing by Schwarz staff.

NOPD's Young said police separately investigated all 53 calls for service this calendar year but said staff in the police district could only recall the one arrest of the staff member for slapping a student. The RSD's Haggen said he investigated one allegation and found Camelot handled the case appropriately.

The district supplied Schwarz with the teaching staff. But Camelot hired its own administrative team and security staff -- the behavior interventionists -- and essentially called the shots at the school, Vallas said. About 10 Camelot employees worked there at any given time.

Vallas decided in late spring not to renew Camelot's contract for next school year, bringing the district's alternative programs fully under district control. But he said the decision had nothing to do with Camelot's performance.

"We are ready to run this in-house so we can serve more kids with less money," he said, adding that the district will probably keep some Camelot staff.

Judge probes slamming

Reports of security staff "slamming" Schwarz students -- pinning a their arms behind their back and slamming them into a wall or floor -- prompted Keith Doley, an ad hoc Juvenile Court judge, to request a district attorney investigation last year. Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro said he is awaiting more information before deciding whether to start a probe.

Lakendra Luque, a slight, talkative 17-year-old Schwarz student, described what several people call a typical scene. A Camelot staffer grabbed her by the shoulder one morning for wearing her sweater, a violation of school rules. As the man held the teen, she started "getting smart with him," cursing and complaining.

"He threw me against the wall and, as I flailed, body-slammed me on the ground," Luque said.

Luque, who was a month pregnant at the time, left the school and never returned.

Lindsey said the "interventionists" received a one-hour training session in restraints, and some of Lindsey's bosses encouraged him to be physically aggressive.

"They would say, 'You let them play with you, you're weak. You have to take them down,'¤" Lindsey said.

Camelot officials disputed this account, saying behavior specialists, like Lindsey, received 40 to 80 hours of training in the summer, plus professional development throughout the school year.

"Staff members are trained to use physical intervention as a last resort to protect themselves, other staff and students from harm," they said in a written statement.

Not all of the behavior specialists were overly aggressive, said students and teachers. Some seemed to genuinely care about the students, and a few of the most aggressive staffers were fired or quit midyear, they said.

But August Collins, the director of youth advocacy at the Youth Empowerment Project, said he saw situations in which staff inappropriately "roughed up" students who did not pose an immediate physical threat. His organization works with juvenile offenders returning to their community, and Collins visited Schwarz several times to check on students.

Doley said that when a Schwarz student first described being slammed during a court session, he had no idea what the term meant. After that, he made a habit of asking the dozens of Schwarz students who came before him if they had ever been slammed or seen someone slammed at school.

"The majority said, 'Yes.'"

Brown, the PE teacher, said he saw Camelot staff go "overboard" on some occasions. But he noted that often students did pose a danger to themselves or others.

"There were some bad things that took place with the restraints," he said. "But I have to say it was a deterrent for some of the bad behavior because that was the only consequence that existed in the school."

Some of the turmoil was inherent to a school that seeks to educate expelled or arrested students. At times, the expelling school would supply only limited information, teachers said, like a single photocopied image of the weapon or drugs found in the student's backpack or locker. That made it difficult to determine whether the student needed special education services or should be separated from certain other students.

Many problems stemmed from chronic turnover in leadership: Camelot had three different executive directors in New Orleans and as many different operations directors at Schwarz over the course of the school year, according to teachers. Camelot and RSD officials disputed this account, saying there were only two different site leaders at Schwarz, and that the New Orleans executive director position did not change hands. They offered conflicting accounts of who was leading the school during its final months of the school year, however.

Some parents also said Camelot and school officials were unresponsive, even after violent incidents. For instance, one mother said she tried for weeks to get information after two other students broke her son's jaw. The child spent a week in Children's Hospital, his jaw held in place by metal wires, after the classroom pummeling.

"I don't know their names, how old they are, or who they are," the mother said. "Everyone was like, 'Hush, hush.'"

Months later she still had not received an incident report about that fight or an earlier one on a school bus. The 13-year-old was hospitalized after both incidents.

A Camelot spokesman said school officials immediately notified the mother; he referred to the incident report as an "internal document."

Juvenile Judge David Bell said not all the missteps can be blamed on Camelot: The school district and court system also planned poorly in creating Schwarz. "We didn't think about (the dangers of) kids coming from state custody all going to one school," he said.

One student found that out the hard way -- receiving an unpleasant surprise when she reported to Schwarz for her first day this spring.

When she saw a young man who had shot her multiple times last September, the girl ran from the building, her mother said. Until a juvenile judge intervened, Schwarz officials were unresponsive, the mother said.

The judge arranged for the student to transfer to Booker T. Washington, which he attended until her arrest and jailing in an unrelated incident late last month, according to the mother.

Scant supplies, services

Teachers said the RSD and Camelot put the city's neediest students in a crumbling building with scant supplies and inadequate mental health services.

"Some of the students had one 'zero tolerance' infraction, like getting caught with drugs," Jalali said. "Others have bottomed out of every situation they've ever been in. Then they arrive at our door, and we don't have the resources to help them."

RSD officials responded that the "curriculum materials that were available to other schools in the district were made available to Schwarz."

But teachers said Schwarz tried to serve more than 300 troubled children, during peak enrollment periods, with one social worker, and none of the high-tech equipment -- such as the interactive whiteboards -- that many other schools received. Indeed, the power system once crashed when multiple teachers tried to use their overhead projectors at the same time.

The classrooms did not have functioning computers, several teachers reported. The district said "laptop carts" were used to bring technology into classrooms.

Brown said he had to push aggressively, even for PE equipment.

"Everybody spoke out of both sides of their mouth," he said. "They would say, 'We are going to give you everything you need to be successful.'